Teams : Counselors

"Keeping us sane enough"

Counselors

You are the Counselors of Thermopylae, a part of a support organization built in Haven in order to help people survive the post-Nightfall world. It is thanks to people like you that suicides are avoided to the extent that they are, that people have the energy to wake up and do their job every day. Yes, it costs significant resources to have so many counselors working for such a small number of people, but history has shown that it is absolutely necessary. The costs were high enough as they were, before, and now they’ve dropped off. Casualties are down. Now that the acute phase of survival is over, the traumas people have accumulated will need to be taken care of or we will have a pressure boiler of epic proportions on our hands.

Structure

You have a rather informal structure. Certainly, you are part of the military hierarchy but Command generally leave you alone to do what you do best. You have the right to pick people out of their work schedules if that’s when you have time to talk to someone, even if Command might grumble a bit about it. That’s fine. Some people don’t know it and might make a fuss - it isn’t exactly a rule, but a common practice. People realize that your work is prioritized.

You have team meetings where you brief each other on what’s going on, potential problems and to discuss any particular individuals that are in dire straits. In theory, these meetings can be confidential from everyone, including Intelligence. It hasn’t really been tested so far - no citizen of Haven has been judged to be enough of a internal security risk to provoke a full out confidential investigation as far as you know. If there has been, you don’t know about it. In practice, you rarely see reason to truly hide things away. You have a good connection with Intelligence where you can share dangers and security risks so you can handle it together, as a collective.

Seeing how the Counselors are such a small group and so independent, the actual day to day work often varies depending on who is on shift, who is working with what at the time and what the current priorities are. Each of you are responsible to make your own plans and shape your own structure in accordance with what you believe is best for the Outpost.

Techniques

After nightfall there aren’t really a whole lot of literature on psychology, anger management, therapy etc left, so you have had to stitch together what you can from memory, deduction and trial-and-error. As such your sessions with patients can take all manner of forms; group sessions, counseling talks, cognitive behavioural therapy etc, even sometimes trying roleplaying. You are constantly talking to each other trying to rediscover and renegotiate methods to deal with the traumas the people of Haven are struggling with.

Contact with Haven

You have some contact with the Citizen’s Council in Haven. They are concerned that Thermopylae might be straining people too much and are monitoring the things going on there. Your plots will have more information about this.